Posts tagged electricity

Don't be too quick to toss out the battery from that ancient laptop -- it might just be the key to powering homes in developing countries, and helping the environment in the process. IBM researchers have revealed UrJar, a device that turns old lithium-ion battery packs into rechargeable energy sou...

Solar power just hit one of its biggest milestones, in more ways than one. First Solar recently finished building Topaz, a 550-megawatt plant that represents the largest active solar farm on the planet. And we do mean large -- the installation's nine million solar panels cover 9.5 square miles of ...

If WiTricity CEO Alex Gruzen gets his way, the company's tech will soon wind up in your phone, your car and even inside your body. That's because the Massachusetts-based company deals in magnetic resonance technology, and if those words don't mean anything to you now, they probably will before lon...

Normally, breaking a PC's security involves either finding security exploits or launching brute force attacks, neither of which is necessarily quick or easy. However, a team at Tel Aviv University has come up with a potentially much simpler way to swipe data from a computer: touch it. If you make ...

All life is ultimately powered by electricity, albeit indirectly, since most organisms consume sugars that produce electrochemical reactions. Several types of bacteria are known to skip the sweets and go straight for the electrons, however -- and researchers have discovered that they may be everyw...

Water is pretty wild when you think about it: all of its three states of matter are consumable by humans, and one in particular can even give off electrical power. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has discovered that when water condenses on and spontaneously jumps back and forth...

Thermoelectrics -- which use wasted heat to generate electricity -- could get a lot more interesting thanks to a company called Alphabet Energy. It's set to commercialize tetrahedrite, a metal that more than doubles the efficiency of current tech for as little as a fiftieth the cost. Thermoelectri...

Since the beginning, the commercial growth of renewable energy has been a laborious, often painful matter of government pushes, tax incentives and campaigning for greater awareness. In Germany, however, the energy market is on the cusp of evolving to the next step: An era in which the sun and the ...

You may recall The Oatmeal's (aka Matthew Inman's) fundraising campaign to save Nikola Tesla's former lab and get a museum built in the electrical pioneer's honor. Well, it only partly succeeded; while the money was enough to rescue the property, Inman realized that it would take at least $8 milli...

Solar panels have become cheaper and more efficient in recent years, but you can't say the same for the big, costly inverters turning their energy into usable electricity. Google isn't happy with this lack of progress, so it's about to launch the Little Box Challenge, an open competition to build ...

If there's one thing you should know about Engadget, it's that we absolutely love lasers. And thanks to the University of Arizona and University of Central Florida, our favorite pulsating form of light might soon find a much less destructive purpose, than say on Navy ships, anti-missile airliners ...

Soldiers don't have many options for overcoming sleep deprivation outside of a good cup of coffee. If the Air Force Research Laboratory's experiments prove successful, though, troops may rely on tiny jolts of electricity to stay alert. By using a mild current to stimulate key parts of the brain, t...

Solar power just hit the big time in the US -- BrightSource Energy has confirmed that the world's largest solar thermal plant, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California, is up and running. The array, also backed by Google and NRG Energy, produces a total 392MW of power through 173...

It's not very often that a light switch really catches Engadget's eye, so you know it has to be something clever to show up on our virtual pages. This particular lightbulb activation device (as demonstrated by NXP) is not only wireless, it's powerless -- we were able to turn on a wireless lightbul...

Hydrogen fuel cells have been helping astronauts for nearly half a century already, so it's about time they became small enough -- and cheap enough -- to be of use to everyone else. That's exactly what Intelligent Energy claims to have achieved with its the latest fuel cell system, called the "Upp...

Google's goal of meeting its electrical needs with renewable sources got another big boost today. The Happy Hereford wind farm in Texas will produce 240 megawatts of juice, and all of that output has been bought by Big G. That power won't flow directly from the turbines into Google's data centers,...

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line. Decking out homes with smartphone-controlled appliances and using gadgets to keep tabs on elect...

IBM is no stranger to energy concerns, and now its founded the Smarter Energy Research Institute in partnership with Canada's Hydro-Québec, the Netherlands' Alliander, and the US' DTE Energy to help build a better grid. The partnership will leverage Big Blue's computing and analytic oomph t...

Google has made a point of relying on renewable resources for its data centers whenever possible, even down to the cooling. It hasn't had quite as unique an arrangement as what it's planning for its data center in Oklahoma, though. The search firm wants to supply its Mayes County location with 48MW...

Sharp has announced an unusual photovoltaic panel for the Japanese market that collects energy from the sun while still allowing the light to shine on through. Though it's rated at a lowly 6.8 percent / 98 watt max efficiency, the glass-like properties make it useful as a construction material (as...